CPS:Small:Collaborative Research: Incentivizing Desirable User Behavior in a Class of CPS

在大型基础设施系统等网络物理系统(CPS)中，个人用户正在从被动的服务消费者转变为主动的参与者。这一转变带来了社会效益、经济效益和环境效益。例如，通过分布式可再生能源整合将消费者转变为“消费者”可以提高可持续性，而将用户转变为有关交通和路况的数据来源可以帮助缓解拥堵。然而，决策者的激增也导致了决策制定的关注点、目标和质量的异质性。参与者将根据自己的自身利益优化他们在数据收集、数据共享和驱动方面的决策。在一个相互关联的系统中，这些决策将影响系统状态，从而影响其他参与者从系统中获得的效用。在极端情况下，少数决策者的行动也可能导致不稳定等不良和意想不到的后果。因此，迫切需要理解和调整不同参与者的决策，以便他们将其决策对其他参与者的系统性能和效用的影响内在化；拟议的研究解决了这一领域的基本问题。这项拟议的研究可能会产生重大的社会和经济影响。CPS系统(如基础设施系统)的总趋势是允许用户成为主动参与者。然而，这将对这类系统的传统算法和组织提出挑战。由于大多数CPS系统向公众提供基本服务，因此需要设计出在不考虑自利参与者的战略行为的情况下保证可靠运行的设计。这项研究与教育计划相结合，包括研究和教育的整合、课程设计、学生咨询和培训以及外展。现有的方法，如合作控制或竞争博弈论，参与者是价格接受者，不足以考虑参与者的战略行为。基于这一观察，本提案将通过以下方式推进CPS的科学：(I)将这一问题抽象为设计合同的一种，根据该合同，战略用户的决策可以协调一致，以获得期望的系统性能；(Ii)在受大规模CPS(如智能基础设施系统)启发的几个假设下，为该模型提出新的机制；以及(Iii)通过将该框架应用于几个CPS案例研究来展示该框架的有效性。所提出的方法将最优化和系统理论与经济学和机制设计以及来自特定基础设施系统的模型和约束相结合。

In Cyberphysical Systems (CPS) such as large scale infrastructure systems, individual users are shifting from being passive consumers of services to active participants. This shift promises societal, economic, and environmental benefits. For example, turning consumers into "prosumers" through distributed renewable energy integration can improve sustainability, and turning users into sources of data about traffic and road conditions can help alleviate congestion. However, an explosion of decision makers also leads to heterogeneity in concerns, aims, and quality of decision making. Participants will optimize their decisions on data collection, data sharing, and actuation based on their own self-interest. In an interconnected system, these decisions will affect the system state, and hence, the utilities other participants derive from the system. In extreme cases, undesirable and unintended consequences such as instability can also ensue from actions of a few decision makers. Thus, there is an urgent need to understand and modulate decision making by various participants so that they internalize the impact on system performance and utilities of the other participants that their decisions produce; the proposed research solves basic problems in this domain. The proposed research has potentially substantial social and economic impact. The general trend in CPS systems, such as infrastructure systems, is to allow users to become active participants. However, this will challenge the traditional algorithms and organization for such systems. Since most CPS systems provide basic services to the population, designs that guarantee reliable operation in spite of strategic behavior of self-interested participants are needed. The research is coupled with an education plan that includes integration of research and education, curriculum design, student advising and training, as well as outreach.Existing approaches such as cooperative control or competitive game theory in which participants are price takers are insufficient to consider strategic behavior by participants. Motivated by this observation, this proposal will advance the science of CPS by (i) abstracting this problem into one of designing contracts by which the decisions of strategic users, who may anticipate the effect of their actions and misreport any information, can be aligned to obtain desired system performance, (ii) presenting new mechanisms for this model under several assumptions inspired by large scale CPS such as smart infrastructure systems, and (iii) demonstrating the efficacy of this framework by applying it to several CPS case studies. The proposed approach couples optimization and systems theory with economics and mechanism design as well as models and constraints from specific infrastructure systems.